Search results for ""Author Yamada Murasaki""

In the end, we''re all the samewe just want to be smothered like babies against anotherhuman''s beating heartThrough a cracked door, heartsick Emi hears a playful growl. Cautiously, she lets her lover ina wolf of a man wielding a bouquet of roses. His shoulders must have been four inches wider than mine. As I stood behind him, I fantasized about the broadness of his chest and the thickness of his neck...and about becoming his mistress once again.And so their story goes. For a young woman interested in love without the hassle of a traditional relationship, an affair with someone else's spoiled husband is just what she ordereduntil it''s time to move on.Then there's Yuko: with even less time for married men''s shenanigans, she turns her attention to her aging father and the guilt of adultery that has gnawed at his heart for years. Her mother is long dead, yet her memory is enshrined for eternity in theirboth father's and daughter''smirrored in

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A celebrated masterwork shimmering with vulnerability from one of alt-manga's most important female artists. 'Now that we ve woken from the dream, what are we going to do?' Chiharu thinks to herself, rubbing her husband s head affectionately. Set in an apartment complex on the outskirts of Tokyo, Yamada Murasaki's Talk To My Back (1981 84) explores the fraying of Japan's suburban middle-class dreams through a woman's relationship with her two daughters as they mature and assert their independence, and with her husband, who works late and sees his wife as little more than a domestic servant. While engaging frankly with the compromises of marriage and motherhood, Yamada remains generous with the characters who fetter her protagonist. When her husband has an affair, Chiharu feels that she, too, has broken the marital contract by straying from the template of the happy housewife. Yamada saves her harshest criticisms for society at large, particularly its false promises of eternal satisfaction within the nuclear family as fears of having been 'thrown away inside that empty vessel called the household' gnaw at Chiharu s soul. Yamada was the first cartoonist in Japan to use the expressive freedoms of alt-manga to address domesticity and womanhood in a realistic, critical, and sustained way. A watershed work of literary manga, Talk To My Back was serialized in the influential magazine Garo in the early 1980s, and is translated by Eisner nominated Ryan Holmberg.

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